Oh wait, you said COURTESY...hrmmm...now there's a word that's not in my vocabulary. *sigh* Bother.

The difficult question is what you define as spoilers. I mean, some people are kinda freaky and don't wanna know ANYTHING about a series, like even what the characters names are. But then you have other peeps, who as long as you don't give away the precise dialog, don't much care. So uh, I guess the best bet is to just find some place in the middle and go with yer own judgement... *shrugs*

Of course my own personal opinions fall somewhere along the lines of "People should learn not to read the spoilers in the first place!" I mean obviously if someone starts a thread about Hellsing and you've never watched it before and don't want any of it to be spoiled, well freakin duh, don't read the damn thing! o_O

Onideus_Mad_Hatter wrote:Of course my own personal opinions fall somewhere along the lines of "People should learn not to read the spoilers in the first place!" I mean obviously if someone starts a thread about Hellsing and you've never watched it before and don't want any of it to be spoiled, well freakin duh, don't read the damn thing

you have to remember that people are generally stupid, therefore its needed to keep from upsetting the dumb.

Oh wait, you said COURTESY...hrmmm...now there's a word that's not in my vocabulary. *sigh* Bother.

The difficult question is what you define as spoilers. I mean, some people are kinda freaky and don't wanna know ANYTHING about a series, like even what the characters names are. But then you have other peeps, who as long as you don't give away the precise dialog, don't much care. So uh, I guess the best bet is to just find some place in the middle and go with yer own judgement... *shrugs*

Of course my own personal opinions fall somewhere along the lines of "People should learn not to read the spoilers in the first place!" I mean obviously if someone starts a thread about Hellsing and you've never watched it before and don't want any of it to be spoiled, well freakin duh, don't read the damn thing! o_O

It's also useful fo when discussing spoilers to a specific series in a non-series-specific thread. Such as, in a "favourite couples" thread, someone might want to talk about a couple that don't get together until later in a particular series, and hence might spoiler-hide such that other people can talk about obvious, spoiler-free couples without ruining that series.

StarRaiders]cV[ wrote:why bother doing this though? if anyone REALLY wanted to know cuz alot of pplz r the kind who read the back of the books 1st, theyd use this thing newayz!!! sorry hadda get that out

If you're asking why we should use spoiler tags at all- and I'm not entirely sure that you are- it's so that people can choose whether or not they want to see the spoilers.

In my opinion, I like to read spoilers because I can't wait until the anime series/episode comes out. I read them to find out about the characters and the plot and such. It doesn't spoil the anime for me, it just gives me something to look forward to. Because, nothing can spoil the actual viewing of an anime. But, I can comply w/ other people's desires in not wanting to have their anime 'spoiled' on them. Cause I'm just a cute little girl in her own cute little anime world.

A spoiler is a major plot point to someone who hasn't seen the show/movie yet. Example: Someone has never seen the original movie "Star Wars". A spoiler for that could be:

Star Wars spoiler wrote:In the middle of the movie, Obewan is killed by Darth Vader so that Luke, Leia, and the rest can excape from the Death Star.

OR

Darth Vader is actually Luke Skywalker's father.

Mentioning something like that to someone who hasn't seen the movie could effectively "spoil" the movie for them since they already know what is going to happen.

Unfortunatly, most modern movie trailers are just a bunch of spoilers. I really really really wish they didn't say "I see dead people" in the trailer for Sixth Sense. That would have made the first half of the movie MUCH more enjoyable.